26 - Empowerment through reading, writing and example: the Devotio moderna

Summary

During the last decades of the fourteenth century a movement of religious revival started in the present-day Netherlands, which came to be known as the Modern Devotion, after a term coined by Henry Pomerius in his On the Origin of the Monastery of Groenendaal when he called Geert Grote the ‘fountain and origin of the present-day devotion (modernae devotionis) among the regular canons’.

Geert Grote (1340–84), the son of a wealthy citizen of Deventer, studied in Paris and embarked on an ecclesiastical career, but a severe illness brought about a conversion in 1372, when he renounced his prebends and started a life of asceticism. After several years of retreat in a Carthusian monastery, he was ordained a deacon and began to preach in the diocese of Utrecht, exhorting his audience to a life of purity and spiritual renewal (1379). He fought the decadence of the church and denounced her many vices, against the background of the Western Schism. Grote criticised the secular clergy for its wealth, its multiple transgressions of the rule of celibacy and its simony. The monastic orders, too, were accused of committing simony by requiring dowers at admission. Another reproach at their address was the presence of proprietarii within their ranks: monks and nuns who did not take their vow of poverty seriously.